Exhibitions, Italy, Milano, 11 April 2015
Parisian portraits
by Alessandra Frosini
“Paris is but a dream1” of a secret life that animates the city, made of stories, literature, music, of the past that merges with the present and of which, with great force, the irreducible and corporeal presence of the city is nourished. A unique poem that has inevitably imbued the stones of a city in constant transformation, that has inspired countless artists and writers over the centuries; Nicolò Quirico has been able to look at it and interpret it, through his inner eye, in order to offer us a distillate of history and vitality, revealing outside the inside of things.
In the series of works entitled Photo Paris, presented for the first time to the public, what we observe is a life ready to come alive unexpectedly and surprisingly, in a very similar way as it happens in La boîte à joujoux by Claude Debussy, a suggestion from which Quirico’s work on the Ville Lumière starts. In Debussy’s ballet, intended for the puppet theatre dedicated to children, the toys, taking advantage of the quiet of the night, come out of the box in which they are confined to live their independent lives, different from the one “known” by human beings, but to a large extent parallel to it, in which loves, battles and fights happen.
Under the lens of this double life, the works of PhotoParis also liven up, dominated by “urban theatre actors” and “silent toys”, moved by an imaginary “puppeteer” in the space occupied by visionary buildings that surprise us with their architecture and the daring glimpses with which they are proposed by the artist to the gaze of all of us: whale-buildings or rocket-palaces, constructions that are in relation among themselves, as a question and an answer, or that live in community or in an opposition of views and volumes.
Paris livens then up, experiencing the double reality of a real and dreamed city, whose magic seems to light up in the colourful figures that populate it: sculptures, installations and figures that abound in the city and that are apparently dormant, tough are ready to be discovered by the eye filtered from photography. Thus, instead of toy soldiers and dolls, are the red spider by Alexander Calder or Joan Miró’s characters, as well as the figures by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle in the Beaubourg fountain or from the pipes of the Centre Pompidou, from the Art Nouveau entrance news-stands of the metro by Hector Guimard, or the green chairs of the Jardin des Tuileries. Any tangible and visible form and every architectural detail is part of a labyrinth, a sign of a perspective that gaze carefully contemplates in order to find, after slow observation, the trace of a hidden path.
Thus we can perceive the voices coming from the apparently dumb palaces, of an architecture that should, as a discipline of the space organization of human beings, speak through its forms of the life of those who animate it. The palaces thus become containers, boîte à joujoux, for the citizens-toys, absent from these images, vague and hidden presences, of which we can just grasp the voices, ready to talk to us through the architecture.
To the true reading of the image, on the basis of extremely rational and measured criteria, this evocative reading is added, which refers to the memory and the possibilities related to the very existence.
At first it may seem that Quirico wants to focus the attention on a precise object, but then we realize that the intent is to lead us into an open and suspended world, where each element, showing itself, also shows something beyond, referring to an infinite bond of subtle correspondences, which we are asked to search. It is as if the frame opened on another place, that draws the gaze into things and the interior of the things towards the gaze, expanding it in all directions.
As in a microcosm, every image contains something that transcends contingent time and our narcissist rationalism, always tended to bend reality to our expectations. The search is oriented towards a view dominated by movements of gaze that are nourished of slow times, almost meditative, able to dig into the folds of reality, to bring out the echo of new memories and experiences almost removed.
Quirico’s works are contractions of the real image with the one dreamed and the one built, encrypted images with multiple reading possibilities to be guessed and found, starting from the horizon of a city. They are antidotes to the consumption rate of modern images, suggesting departures, entrusting a sort of “taste” that is accountable of totality without having to harm it, but rather triggering a reflection on the possible inter-crossing realities. This is why the photographs are identified in a pattern of Cartesian axes that create a geometric network of clear and meditated visions in which the images become the metaphor of a rational and humane path, inside the infinite multiplicity of experience.
In Photo Paris, Quirico confronts himself with a city that has always been at the heart of the collective unconscious and that includes an almost endless list of looks and hearts captured by its charm. Photography, which was born right here, on the banks of the Seine, has fed the city of requited love, and many photographers have portrayed Paris in its multiple forms: from Daguerre, who invented, together with Niépce, this new form of art, to Marville, Atget, Lartigue, Brassaï, Kertész, Ronis, Doisneau, Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Erwitt and many others.
Quirico’s voice is clearly added to these ones, with a search that is not focused on a condition of everyday life into which measuring oneself; his images capture us because they look at the city into its eyes, without concessions to the deliberately beautiful, calling us to a new discovery, which may take place on multiple levels. Moreover, the process of vision is always ambiguous and never closed, and as in his other cycles (London Calling, for example), the buildings that he realizes have an infinite possibility of cross-references, through images and written words, through the relationship between the reality and its past and future, as well as its possible interpretations. The technique is the one to which Quirico has accustomed us, one of its distinguishing marks: a complex structure of multiple shootings joined into a collage and printed on sheets of old books, unique works which, in this case, are “based” on books bought on the stalls along the Seine. Texts, not only in French, of literature, arts, but also engineering, indistinguishable and mostly unreadable, that constitute the hidden soul that rises at times, of the works he creates.
The image thus hides the evidence of a connotation linked to the verbal language, in which the overlap between iconic and non-iconic signs find a wise balance, which is embodied by a visual presence able to consider the life of shapes and people. One way to go beyond the language of photography and find time for a thorough look in order to get to understand the “operation” of the work, the subtle play of existing references. The pages of the books that are the basis of the works create a stream of indistinguishable voices, memory and life at the same time, that substantiate them and become their structure, making them unique pieces.
In a game backwards, at the end of our journey we got to the installation work chosen as the cover image of this catalogue: the flow of voices translates into a “palace of words” and is projected outside, to direct us towards Rue Simon-Crubellier n. 11, the imaginary street of the non-existing palace thought by Georges Perec in his novel La vie mode d’emploi. The events of this “hypertext fiction” are held in a block composed of ten floors of ten rooms each, shaping a double square of a hundred elements, whose front façade allows to view each room immediately and simultaneously. In the story, which proceeds as a knight in the chess game, each room will be touched but one, that will be the only one never occupied by any event told of the one-hundred-year life of the building. One hundred photos will make the simulacrum building of Rue Crubellier n. 11, a game of preparation and of signs that intersect, in the desire of distinguishing and seeing beyond the image: “Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears. A taxi bears him off, a metro carries him away, the tower doesn’t care, nor the Pantheon. Paris is but a dream2”.
1-2 R. Queneau, Zazie nel metro, Einaudi, Torino 1970, p. 67.
by Alessandra Frosini
“Paris is but a dream1” of a secret life that animates the city, made of stories, literature, music, of the past that merges with the present and of which, with great force, the irreducible and corporeal presence of the city is nourished. A unique poem that has inevitably imbued the stones of a city in constant transformation, that has inspired countless artists and writers over the centuries; Nicolò Quirico has been able to look at it and interpret it, through his inner eye, in order to offer us a distillate of history and vitality, revealing outside the inside of things.
In the series of works entitled Photo Paris, presented for the first time to the public, what we observe is a life ready to come alive unexpectedly and surprisingly, in a very similar way as it happens in La boîte à joujoux by Claude Debussy, a suggestion from which Quirico’s work on the Ville Lumière starts. In Debussy’s ballet, intended for the puppet theatre dedicated to children, the toys, taking advantage of the quiet of the night, come out of the box in which they are confined to live their independent lives, different from the one “known” by human beings, but to a large extent parallel to it, in which loves, battles and fights happen.
Under the lens of this double life, the works of PhotoParis also liven up, dominated by “urban theatre actors” and “silent toys”, moved by an imaginary “puppeteer” in the space occupied by visionary buildings that surprise us with their architecture and the daring glimpses with which they are proposed by the artist to the gaze of all of us: whale-buildings or rocket-palaces, constructions that are in relation among themselves, as a question and an answer, or that live in community or in an opposition of views and volumes.
Paris livens then up, experiencing the double reality of a real and dreamed city, whose magic seems to light up in the colourful figures that populate it: sculptures, installations and figures that abound in the city and that are apparently dormant, tough are ready to be discovered by the eye filtered from photography. Thus, instead of toy soldiers and dolls, are the red spider by Alexander Calder or Joan Miró’s characters, as well as the figures by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle in the Beaubourg fountain or from the pipes of the Centre Pompidou, from the Art Nouveau entrance news-stands of the metro by Hector Guimard, or the green chairs of the Jardin des Tuileries. Any tangible and visible form and every architectural detail is part of a labyrinth, a sign of a perspective that gaze carefully contemplates in order to find, after slow observation, the trace of a hidden path.
Thus we can perceive the voices coming from the apparently dumb palaces, of an architecture that should, as a discipline of the space organization of human beings, speak through its forms of the life of those who animate it. The palaces thus become containers, boîte à joujoux, for the citizens-toys, absent from these images, vague and hidden presences, of which we can just grasp the voices, ready to talk to us through the architecture.
To the true reading of the image, on the basis of extremely rational and measured criteria, this evocative reading is added, which refers to the memory and the possibilities related to the very existence.
At first it may seem that Quirico wants to focus the attention on a precise object, but then we realize that the intent is to lead us into an open and suspended world, where each element, showing itself, also shows something beyond, referring to an infinite bond of subtle correspondences, which we are asked to search. It is as if the frame opened on another place, that draws the gaze into things and the interior of the things towards the gaze, expanding it in all directions.
As in a microcosm, every image contains something that transcends contingent time and our narcissist rationalism, always tended to bend reality to our expectations. The search is oriented towards a view dominated by movements of gaze that are nourished of slow times, almost meditative, able to dig into the folds of reality, to bring out the echo of new memories and experiences almost removed.
Quirico’s works are contractions of the real image with the one dreamed and the one built, encrypted images with multiple reading possibilities to be guessed and found, starting from the horizon of a city. They are antidotes to the consumption rate of modern images, suggesting departures, entrusting a sort of “taste” that is accountable of totality without having to harm it, but rather triggering a reflection on the possible inter-crossing realities. This is why the photographs are identified in a pattern of Cartesian axes that create a geometric network of clear and meditated visions in which the images become the metaphor of a rational and humane path, inside the infinite multiplicity of experience.
In Photo Paris, Quirico confronts himself with a city that has always been at the heart of the collective unconscious and that includes an almost endless list of looks and hearts captured by its charm. Photography, which was born right here, on the banks of the Seine, has fed the city of requited love, and many photographers have portrayed Paris in its multiple forms: from Daguerre, who invented, together with Niépce, this new form of art, to Marville, Atget, Lartigue, Brassaï, Kertész, Ronis, Doisneau, Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Erwitt and many others.
Quirico’s voice is clearly added to these ones, with a search that is not focused on a condition of everyday life into which measuring oneself; his images capture us because they look at the city into its eyes, without concessions to the deliberately beautiful, calling us to a new discovery, which may take place on multiple levels. Moreover, the process of vision is always ambiguous and never closed, and as in his other cycles (London Calling, for example), the buildings that he realizes have an infinite possibility of cross-references, through images and written words, through the relationship between the reality and its past and future, as well as its possible interpretations. The technique is the one to which Quirico has accustomed us, one of its distinguishing marks: a complex structure of multiple shootings joined into a collage and printed on sheets of old books, unique works which, in this case, are “based” on books bought on the stalls along the Seine. Texts, not only in French, of literature, arts, but also engineering, indistinguishable and mostly unreadable, that constitute the hidden soul that rises at times, of the works he creates.
The image thus hides the evidence of a connotation linked to the verbal language, in which the overlap between iconic and non-iconic signs find a wise balance, which is embodied by a visual presence able to consider the life of shapes and people. One way to go beyond the language of photography and find time for a thorough look in order to get to understand the “operation” of the work, the subtle play of existing references. The pages of the books that are the basis of the works create a stream of indistinguishable voices, memory and life at the same time, that substantiate them and become their structure, making them unique pieces.
In a game backwards, at the end of our journey we got to the installation work chosen as the cover image of this catalogue: the flow of voices translates into a “palace of words” and is projected outside, to direct us towards Rue Simon-Crubellier n. 11, the imaginary street of the non-existing palace thought by Georges Perec in his novel La vie mode d’emploi. The events of this “hypertext fiction” are held in a block composed of ten floors of ten rooms each, shaping a double square of a hundred elements, whose front façade allows to view each room immediately and simultaneously. In the story, which proceeds as a knight in the chess game, each room will be touched but one, that will be the only one never occupied by any event told of the one-hundred-year life of the building. One hundred photos will make the simulacrum building of Rue Crubellier n. 11, a game of preparation and of signs that intersect, in the desire of distinguishing and seeing beyond the image: “Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears. A taxi bears him off, a metro carries him away, the tower doesn’t care, nor the Pantheon. Paris is but a dream2”.
1-2 R. Queneau, Zazie nel metro, Einaudi, Torino 1970, p. 67.
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